‘that gallop was practice’: a horse ride as practice run for things to come in sylvia...
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‘That Gallop Was Practice’: A Horse Ride asPractice Run for Things to Come in SylviaPlath's ‘Whiteness I Remember’ and TedHughes's ‘Sam’Georg Noffkea
a Department of English University of Pretoria South AfricaPublished online: 10 Oct 2013.
To cite this article: Georg Noffke (2013) ‘That Gallop Was Practice’: A Horse Ride as Practice Run for Thingsto Come in Sylvia Plath's ‘Whiteness I Remember’ and Ted Hughes's ‘Sam’, English Academy Review: SouthernAfrican Journal of English Studies, 30:2, 6-20
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English Academy Review 30 (2) 2013ISSN: Print 1013-1752/Online 1753-5360© The English Academy of Southern Africa DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2013.834681 pp. 6–20
‘that Gallop Was Practice’: A Horse Ride as Practice Run for things to Come
in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Whiteness I Remember’ and ted Hughes’s ‘Sam’
Georg NöffkeDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Pretoria
South [email protected]
This article examines closely Sylvia Plath’s ‘Whiteness I Remember’, a poem about a near-disastrous horse-riding mishap, and Ted Hughes’s response to the piece, his poem ‘Sam’. To the casual reader, ‘Whiteness I Remember’ is likely to appear merely as an evocative account of the almost-tragedy, but the poem is, in fact, multifaceted. On the one hand, it showcases Plath’s reappropriation of distinctly Hughesian concerns; on the other, it serves as a site for the exploration of her own nascent preoccupations. In it we see Plath simultaneously developing aspects of the personal mythology she constructs in her body of poetry and, in a shift that anticipates the very last phase of her poetic output, laying the foundation for a transcendence of this mythology. The poem thus functions as a practice run in which she rehearses what will soon become some of her most salient motifs. Ted Hughes, in his ‘Sam’, which was published in Birthday Letters (1998. London: Faber and Faber), and which speaks directly to ‘Whiteness I Remember’, recognizes and lays claim to this concept of the practice run, taking it from Plath’s mythology and remoulding it to fit the myth of Plath he presents in his volume.
Key words: Birthday Letters; horses in poetry; Ted Hughes; intertextuality; Sylvia Plath; poetic selfhood; ‘Sam’; ‘Whiteness I Remember’
‘I wrote what I consider a “book-poem”’, notes Sylvia Plath (1981, 288) in her journal on 9 July, 1958, ‘about my runaway ride in Cambridge on the horse Sam: a “hard” subject for me, horses alien to me, yet the daredevil change in Sam and my hanging on God knows how is a kind of revelation: it worked well.’ The biographical germ of this so-called ‘book poem’ (a designation that, for Plath, meant it was worthy of publication in a volume), ‘Whiteness I Remember’, occurred in December 1955, shortly after Plath arrived in Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship, and shortly before she met Ted Hughes in February 1956. She had gone horse riding with an old friend from America when the
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horse that had been hired out to her, Sam, seemingly gentle and with a history that was, as the poem phrases it, ‘[h]umdrum, unexceptionable’ (line 7), therefore making it suitable for ‘novices and . . . the timid’ (line 9), suddenly bolted, taking her on a wild and terrifying ride. At one point she slipped from her saddle and, in order to avoid being crushed under the animal’s galloping hooves, had to cling to its neck.
And so the scene is rendered in the resultant poem. Plath, never one to shy away from sound devices and their rhythmic potential, and working with lines of nine syllables arguably quite equestrian in their cadences, gives us a speaker suspicious of her not-quite-wholly-white horse, whose ‘dapple’, which tones his ‘white down / To safe gray’, fails to ‘[gray] his temper’ (lines 10–11). When the speaker’s suspicions are confirmed, and the horse bolts, this is conveyed with quick-fire distress, the rapid alliteration evoking the mad whirl of sensations and sights she must endure. By the end of the poem the speaker is at the horse’s mercy: ‘I hung on his neck’ (line 28), she says.
To the casual reader, then, ‘Whiteness I Remember’ is likely to appear merely as a poem of vivid and straightforward narrative description, an evocative account by a speaker detailing a near-disastrous horse-riding mishap. While such an interpretation is not an inaccurate one (on one level, the poem is exactly that), it is an incomplete one. Apart from evincing the influence of Hughes and showcasing Plath’s personal appropriation of this influence, ‘Whiteness I Remember’ is also a piece in which we see Plath simultaneously developing thematic concerns coming to prominence in her early work and, in a shift that anticipates the very last phase of her poetic output, laying the foundation for a transcendence of these concerns.
In her book Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Margaret Uroff (1979, 13) asserts that there is a similarity between Plath’s interest in ‘psychological states and extreme human experiences’ and Hughes’s ‘concern with the non-human cosmos’. She indicates how, through Hughes, Plath develops an interest in animals and the natural world, the effects of which can be seen right up until her late poems. In ‘Whiteness I Remember’, a poem as much about an interaction with a horse as extreme human experience, this intersection of preoccupations is patently present. Obvious antecedents are Hughes’s poems ‘The Horses’ and ‘Phaetons’, both of which articulate a concern with the non-human cosmos, and both of which were published in his first volume, The Hawk in the Rain, in 1957. The metatextual ‘Phaetons’ has a ‘gentle reader’ (line 6) who reads the tale of the mythical Phaeton and his calamitous attempt to drive the horse-drawn sun-chariot his sun-god father, Helios, drives. But this reader, in a sudden twist, ‘[l]oses the words in mid-sentence’ (line 7), is ‘[t]oss[ed] upside-down’ by a ‘team’ (presumably Phaeton and the sun-horses), and is ‘drag[ged]’, ‘on fire’, ‘[a]mong the monsters of the zodiac’ (lines 9 & 10). The act of reading about a deadly horse ride allows for a displacement of space and time, a momentous personal experience (the reader catches alight), and a shift to a grander perspective: before the celestial monsters of the zodiac, cosmic incarnations of fate, the gentle reader is dwarfed.
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‘The Horses’ follows a similar pattern, only here the horses are not explicitly textual entities, but rather inalienable features of nature. In the piece the speaker, climbing up a hill ‘through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark’ (line 1), encounters on the way a group of wild horses, animals appearing ‘[h]uge in the dense grey – ten together – / Megalith-still’ (lines 9–10). ‘They breathed’, he goes on to say, ‘making no move, // With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves, / Making no sound’ (lines 10–11). The speaker passes them, ‘not one snort[ing] or jerk[ing] its head’ (line 12), and then witnesses a brilliant sunrise, an experience of visionary clarity described as a silent, red eruption that, ‘splitting to its core’, ‘[tears] and [flings] cloud, / [Shakes] the gulf open, [shows] blue, // And the big planets hanging’ (lines 21–23). Fleeing from such an overpowering sight, such an explosion of light, the speaker stumbles back ‘in the fever of a dream’ (line 27) towards the ‘dark woods’ (line 26), and once again runs into the horses. His description continues:
There, still they stood, But now streaming and glistening under the flow of light,
Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves Stirring under a thaw while all around them
The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound. (lines 28-32)
Hughes’s speaker, the lone human in a vast natural landscape, is, like the speaker of ‘Phaetons’, made aware of and humbled by a non-human universe dazzling in its potency. As Keith Sagar (1975, 20) puts it, the poem presents ‘mortal man all too aware of the lack of anything in himself to set against the sun-rise’. And in these immovable and inscrutable horses mortal man finds essential aspects of this realm so intriguing and, on the surface of it, so foreign to him. They bookend the revelatory spectacle and are not, like him, cowed by the grand emergence of the sun. Rather, they seem to be empowered by it, stirred into life because of it, which confirms their integral, their integrated, position in the world they occupy. In contrast to them, the speaker, who states that he hopes to keep the singular memory of this event alive in his mind, ‘[i]n [the] din of . . . crowded streets, going among the years [and] the faces’ (line 36) of his future, indicates that his position lies, ostensibly, in civilized society.
What one finds, then, in a poem like ‘The Horses’, and in many other poems from the early part of Hughes’s career – poems such as ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, ‘The Jaguar’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘Pike’, and ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’ – is what J. M. Coetzee (2003, 95), through the fictional mouthpiece Elizabeth Costello, calls an attempt to enter into ‘a different kind of being-in-the world’. During one of the many lectures that take place in the novel Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous character refers specifically to the poems ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’. She explains that, in them, ‘Hughes is writing against’ the kind of poetry in which ‘animals stand for human qualities: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and so forth’ (pp. 94–95). Instead these two poems, and, we can argue, the many others like them (‘The Horses’, of course, among them),
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‘That Gallop Was Practice’ 9
attempt to ‘recover an attentiveness that our faraway ancestors possessed and we have lost’ (p. 97). Rather than ‘try to find an idea in the animal’, the poems offer ‘the record of an engagement’ (p. 96) with it.
Plath’s ‘Whiteness I Remember’ may also be considered the record of an engagement with an animal, but it is a record of a very different kind. It, like ‘Phaetons’ and ‘The Horses’, offers a close interaction with animal force, and ends with an epiphanic widening of consciousness, ‘a kind of revelation’, as Plath names it in her journal, but such motifs are developed along uniquely personal lines. Indeed, the poem makes for a fascinating example of how Plath absorbs Hughes’s concerns, and then remoulds them in such a way as to fit the preoccupations that are just then beginning to take shape in her work.
For Plath’s speaker the encounter is not with an animal enmeshed in a larger and even overwhelming natural world; nor is she out to recover some rapt state of attentiveness that, on an evolutionary scale, and as Costello says Hughes would argue, has had to give way to ‘the Western bias toward abstract thought’ (Coetzee 2003, 97). Hers is a domesticated horse, and the ‘daredevil change’ he undergoes is read as an act of volition. In fact, a striking feature of the poem is that its horse, a subject the author calls hard, alien, is dealt with so personally. Whereas Hughes’s interest in ‘The Horses’ is cosmological, in other words, concerned with the titular animals not as intellectual constructions but as creatures to be marvelled at for their ontological indescribability, Plath’s interest in her horse is psychological, concerned with the deep private impact the encounter makes on her speaker’s psyche. Several lines suggest that the speaker views the interaction with the animal as pivotal, even life-changing. There is the early assessment in the lines ‘I’ve gone nowhere since but / Going’s been tame deviation’ (lines 3–4), and the later assertion that ‘[t]he world’ was ‘subdued to [the horse’s] run of it’ (line 27). The speaker also seems to compare this first horse ride to a sexual experience, the horse becoming something akin to a lover1 (‘I see him one-tracked, stubborn, white horse, / First horse under me . . .’ she says in lines 12 and 13). Such personification is also present in the description of the abrupt change that overcomes the supposedly timid steed. After an initial ‘neat trot’ (line 14), the speaker recalls how the animal ominously opted for a ‘giddy jog’ (line 17), and how it then, ‘for ill will / or to try [her]’ (lines 17–18),
suddenly set Green grass streaming, houses a river Of pale fronts, straw thatchings, the hard road An anvil, hooves four hammers to jolt [Her] off into their space of beating, Stirrups undone, and decorum. (lines 18–23)
We have here a clash of wills; Sam is asserting his superiority over the speaker. Thus, like the mythical Bellerophon, who attempted to ascend to Mount Olympus on the
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tamed Pegasus, and whose flight, appropriately enough, is often seen as a symbol of poetic inspiration, the speaker is unseated. Unlike Bellerophon, however, she is able to cling to her horse’s neck. And that the horse is male is crucial. Plath may not be working within the tradition that J. M. Coetzee refers to, where animals become culturally-determined embodiments of human characteristics, but she does advance a brand of anthropomorphism that echoes, in interesting ways, the thematic concerns that begin to emerge at this point in her poetic development.
For it is at this stage, in 1958, that we hear the rumblings and see the first nascent instances of what Judith Kroll (2007), snatching a phrase from Hughes, calls Plath’s chapters in a mythology. Drawing on the work of James Frazer and Robert Graves, whose comparative studies of world mythology – in The Golden Bough (1890) and The White Goddess (1941), respectively – provide her with frameworks on which to model autobiographical information, Plath begins to develop a narrative arc that will span her body of work from here on. In this narrative, this self-made mythology, individual poems come to function as instalments tracing its progress. And at the centre of the mythology is, as Kroll (2007, 3) shows, the overriding concern of resolving a divided selfhood, a split into true and false selves which, according to the various speakers, is precipitated by the death of a father. (Plath’s father died shortly after she turned eight.) So crucial is the event in the narrative the poetry offers that we see Plath’s speakers consistently tie it to their notions of personal identity and their constructions of self. Kroll (2007, 9) explains this as follows:
The self that she had defined through her deep attachment to her father continued to press its claims without possibility of satisfaction or development. If her relation to her father was of central importance to her life, then life without him had the character of absence, of unreality and of stagnation; and life with him, in the suspended time of childhood, was impossible of [fulfilment] . . . (When she separates from her husband, she experiences his absence in a similar manner.) The self left back in childhood . . . must be recaptured and rejoined in order for her to live fully in time. Yet because part of herself and her history has remained in parenthesis, everything that has happened to her since that rupture has, in effect, happened to an incomplete person; all subsequent experience has been added to a false foundation, happening to someone not fully integrated with her own history.
A dead father is first mentioned in the poem ‘Full Fathom Five’ (1981, 92), also written in 1958, not long before ‘Whiteness I Remember’. In her journal Plath states that this poem is about her ‘father-sea god-muse’ (1981, 13); in the poem itself the father, poetically resurrected, comes in ‘with the tide’s coming’ (line 2), offering many dangers, ‘defy[ing] questions’ and ‘other godhood’ (lines 39 & 40). We may consider this resurrection an annunciation. After ‘Whiteness I Remember’ Plath will go on to write such poems as ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ (1981, 116), ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ (1981, 118), and ‘The Colossus’ (1981, 129), in which the speaker-daughters, who resemble the many mourning goddesses Frazer identifies in his book, all grieve for the loss of a father, who is seen as an archetypal dead or dying god. These daughters see
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‘That Gallop Was Practice’ 11
their loss also as a loss of a crucial aspect of their selves. In ‘Electra on Azalea Path’ the divided selfhood is first recognized. The daughter, drawing on both psychoanalysis and ancient Greek drama for the construction of a heady psychodrama, avers that her true identity is inextricably locked up with her dead father, that her life since his death has been one long falsehood. In ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ Plath takes the connection one step further and has her speaker marry her father in a sacred grove ritual. Thus we see that these daughters’ lives are dominated, steered by the looming patriarch, and while they seem in places to be aware of the necessity of rebirth, the creation of a life separate from the father, they cannot yet, in this phase of the narrative, conceive of or enact it. Instead they tend faithfully to the memory of the dead but alive daddy as though they were tending to an idol – the daughter of ‘The Colossus’ attempts at length to reconstruct the great ruinous statue that is her father, but views the task as futile, and concludes that her ‘hours are married to shadow’ (line 28).
When we then re-examine the nature of the speaker’s engagement with her horse in ‘Whiteness I Remember’, in the light of what we know is soon to come in Plath’s poetry, certain similarities suggest themselves. ‘I’ve gone nowhere since but / Going’s been tame deviation’ (lines 3–4), the speaker says; ‘[t]he world’ was ‘subdued to [the horse’s] run of it’ (line 27); by the end of the poem all the world’s colours are ‘[s]pinning to still in his one whiteness’ (line 33). It appears as though, in readying herself for the task of endowing her body of work with a mythic dimension, Plath uses ‘Whiteness I Remember’, only an occasional poem at first glance, as a practice run, a run-through of some of the most salient features of her early phase. The speaker relates to her horse in the same way that the daughters of poems just around the bend will relate to their fathers. The experience with the horse is the true experience; all subsequent experience has been false. And aside from the primacy of this experience in her life, the experience itself is one in which the male horse dominates not only the speaker but her whole world.
But if the daughters of Plath’s early phase frequently express themselves in sombre, elegiac tones, the same cannot really be said of the speaker in ‘Whiteness I Remember’. She may acknowledge the falseness of her existence in the wake of her interaction with Sam, but she elaborates no further on her state of frustrating stasis. Instead, she recounts in detail the ‘great run’ (line 2) the horse gave her, and far from being some crumbling colossus, the horse emerges as a thing potently alive; the speaker’s description rings with notes of danger and sexual excitement. The union of speaker and horse, despite being a source of terror, is also a source of vigour, and quite unlike the shadow-marriage enacted in the other poems. This suggests that the speaker is relating to the male horse in another way, that the personified beast contains more than inchoate strains of the father figure, and it is by once again looking at the other poems from this early period in Plath’s poetic career that we may identify another male presence.
Aside from the mournful daughter poems mentioned above, there are also several others – ‘Pursuit’, ‘Ode for Ted’, ‘Firesong’, ‘Faun’, ‘Wreath for a Bridal’, ‘Epitaph for Fire and Flower’, and ‘Man in Black’, all, except for the last one, written before
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the resurrection of the father and the introduction of the mythic drama – that deal with Hughes, and which lay the groundwork for a later role replacement in the constructed narrative.
Almost immediately after having met Hughes, Plath writes ‘Pursuit’, a poem in which a blood-hungry panther, a ‘black marauder’ (line 27), stalks down the speaker, who flees for her life and yet enjoys what she sees as an aggressive seduction. ‘It is not bad’, writes Plath (in Wagner 2000, 54) in her journal on 27 February, 1956; ‘It is dedicated to Ted Hughes’. To her mother she writes that her panther poem ‘is a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself; death, here’, Plath (in Kroll 2007, 255) adds, ‘includes the concept of love’. And over the course of the poems in which constructions of Hughes appear as a manifestation of this dangerous love, he is repeatedly connected with animals and the natural world. The most notable example is probably ‘Faun’, where he assumes the mythological form of the half-human, half-goat referred to in the title, ‘hoove[s] harden[ing] from [his] [feet]’ (line 13), ‘[g]oat-horns’ (line 14) sprouting from his head, and where, ultimately, he becomes a ‘god [rising] / And gallop[ing] woodward’ (lines 14–15). Such enlargement is finally cemented in ‘Man in Black’, the only poem mentioned here written after the return of the father, which focuses on a Hughes-like male figure observed by the speaker from a distance, a figure whose central significance is conveyed in lines that remind us of Sam in ‘Whiteness I Remember’: ‘[f]ixed vortex on the far / Tip’ (lines 19–20), this man is said to ‘[rivet] stones, air, / All of it, together’ (lines 20–21).
Plath’s speaker in ‘Whiteness I Remember’ therefore relates to the horse not only in the same way that her speakers to come will relate to their fathers, but also in the way that her past speakers2 have related to the lover or husband in their lives. And by perceiving these hints of an amalgam of father and husband in the horse, we hit upon another way in which the poem may be read as a practice run. Plath (2000, 447) writes of Hughes in her journal of December 1958: ‘I identify him with my father at certain times, and these times take on great importance . . . insofar as he is a male presence . . . [he] is a substitute for my father’. And so too in the poetry: the great and deathly patriarch who dominates Plath’s mythology comes to be associated with and represented by the husband figure in her late phase. This occurs at a point – in mid-1962, after her separation from Hughes because of his infidelity – when her tone turns aggressive and emphatically impassioned. On 12 October Plath completes her famous poem ‘Daddy’, a piece seething with rage and the desire for the ‘fully[-]achieved selfhood’ that Seamus Heaney (1988, 152) identifies as typical of Plath’s late style; in it the speaker, cancelling the sacred marriage enacted earlier in the mythology, addresses the patriarch and refers to an earlier suicide attempt when she says
At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.
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But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.I made a model of you,A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.And I said I do, I do. (lines 58–67)
Here the ‘man in black’, the same man in black from the poem written three years before, is conflated with daddy. Hughes himself makes this connection in his poem ‘Black Coat’, one of the many in Birthday Letters that speak directly to poems by Plath. At the poem’s conclusion his speaker has his state of being invaded: Plath’s father slides into it.
What ‘Whiteness I Remember’ offers in this regard, then, is another embryonic origin for a motif that will reappear later in Plath’s work. It is not that the horse Sam is the father figure or is the husband; rather, the encounter with the animal and Plath’s treatment of it become sites for the voicing and nurturing of thematic concerns and poetic techniques that have announced themselves in the poet’s subconscious. Judith Kroll (2007, 121) – speaking of late poems that seem to stand outside of the mythic narrative, poems which ‘present neither the source nor the nature of the myth’ and are not ‘ritualised resolutions of it’ either, poems which instead describe events from the daily life of the speaker – presents an argument that is germane to a discussion of ‘Whiteness I Remember’. These apparently extraneous pieces, Kroll (2007, 121–121) says, show
how the myth organizes the elements of daily experience, and they may therefore be called Plath’s equivalent of ‘occasional poems’ in the special sense that each encounter with some element of daily life . . . releases some aspect of the underlying motifs. Although these occasional poems do not describe the myth, they result from it and are chapters in the mythology, even if not key chapters from the point of view of defining it; but even the occasions for poetry are in a sense solicited by the myth itself.
And there is yet another way in which ‘Whiteness I Remember’ may be read as a practice run. As Erica Wagner (2000, 56) indicates, it presages the poem ‘Ariel’, the title poem of what would become Plath’s second volume, and arguably the centrepiece of Plath’s late output. (Poems written in the late phase are often said to have been written in the ‘Ariel voice’.) As has already been suggested, most of the poems from this period – ‘Daddy’ being an excellent example – are practically incandescent in their drive towards fully-achieved selfhood. They bring about new rituals which supplant the earlier funereal lamentations. In them the mournful daughter is transformed into a vengeful goddess-queen, a Clytemnestra-like figure who slays her god. And yet, as Kroll (2007, 182–221) indicates, there are also other poems, poems which go beyond this desire for revenge and agency and which envision a transcendence of selfhood, a
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movement beyond the drama that has been played out in the evolving poetry. At the head of this group stands ‘Ariel’. Plath completed the poem on her thirtieth birthday, and in it she envisions a heady rush towards purification through an imagined horse ride. (The poem is named after the horse.) Tellingly, this horse is not alien or hard or male, but a ‘God’s lioness’ (line 4) with which she becomes one. As the poem reaches its conclusion the horse ride becomes a mythical flight into the sun, which is seen as the site for a fiery self-sacrifice, a place where the speaker may finally let go of self and be reborn into a more fundamental state of being, a ‘mystical union or transcendence’ (Kroll 2007, 193).
‘Whiteness I Remember’ does not quite depict such a letting go of self, but it does approximate it, and also involves an experience of transcendence that we may label a rebirth. By the end of the poem the speaker, threatened with death and clinging to the horse for dear life, finds herself and her world dramatically altered. The situation is one in which she attains a greater degree of awareness, and that this movement into awareness should be read as a movement into transcendence is suggested by Plath’s insistence on associating the event with the colour white.
The word ‘whiteness’, which begins and ends the poem, is used three times, including in the title, the word ‘white’, four. It is as though all the facets, the ‘colors’ (line 32) of the speaker’s existence, converge at and are subsumed by the horse, ‘[s]pinning to still in his one whiteness’ (line 33). (And Plath’s phrasing here almost certainly echoes Hughes’s description of the hawk in his poem ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ [2003, 19]. The bird, which ‘[e]ffortlessly at height hangs his still eye’ [line 5], has ‘wings [which] hold all creation in a weightless quiet’ [line 6], and is viewed as a ‘diamond point of will that polestars / The sea-drowner’s endurance’ [lines 11–12], a ‘master- / Fulcrum of violence’ [lines 14–15].) Plath undoes the prismatic refraction of the speaker’s life by reweaving the rainbow of colours – and let us remember that it was Keats (2000, 93) who accused Newton of ‘[u]nweav[ing] a rainbow’ with his prism – and having it end in the one true experience with Sam. And the use of the colour white has a wider application here as well. In Graves’s The White Goddess, the colour white is associated with ‘birth and growth’ (in Kroll 2007, 61) and represents rebirth. Though Plath completes her assimilation of Graves’s theories in her poetry only in her late phase, where, as Kroll (2007, 55) so clearly illustrates, ‘the White Goddess myth embraces virtually all of the motifs of Plath’s mythicized biography’, we can identify many early and transitional poems in which evidence of Graves’s influence is visible3. ‘Whiteness I Remember’ is likely just such an instance, suggesting that the experience the speaker conveys (a near-death experience) is one that entails a metaphorical death followed by a rebirth. If the near-death here is a death of sorts, the rebirth is envisioned as a state of simplicity that is simultaneously a state of purity and enlightenment (quite literally as well, with the emphasis on ‘whiteness’):
ResolutenessSimplified me: a rider, ridingHung out over hazard, over hooves
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‘That Gallop Was Practice’ 15
Loud on earth’s bedrock. Almost thrown, notThrown: fear, wisdom, at one: all colo[u]rsSpinning to still in his one whiteness. (lines 28–33)
In reconstructing the scene like this, ending the poem on such a frozen moment, Plath cleverly exemplifies Zeno’s arrow paradox. (The moving horse, like Zeno’s hypothetical flying arrow, is, at this isolated instant, motionless, since its position cannot change without factoring in the passage of time.) This is further suggested when we consider the poem’s geometry: the introductory and conclusive instances of the word ‘whiteness’, which give the piece a circular quality, pivot on the word ‘[t]hen’, in line 17 – the central word of the poem, and the word that signals the start of the ‘great run’, the time-bound event made timeless not only by the poem’s ending, but also by the poem as a whole. ‘Whiteness I Remember’, we may therefore say, even betrays elements of concrete poetry, as it also, on a structural level, spins to still, the speaker, caught up with her horse in the ‘[t]hen’, perceiving the colours of her world blurring into white. And the result of this spinning to still is a moment of clarity not unlike ‘the still point of the turning world’ T. S. Eliot describes in the ‘Burnt Norton’ section of his Four Quartets. Plath was familiar with the poem – she alludes to it in her late poem ‘Getting There’, another poem about a movement towards rebirth, with the lines ‘Is there no still place, / Turning and turning in the middle air, / Untouched and untouchable’ (lines 52–54). It is possible that ‘Whiteness I Remember’ offers an early reference to Eliot, that in evoking the concluding vision of the poem Plath draws on Eliot’s examination of an enlarged consciousness, an ecstatic and fearful apprehension of timelessness within time. Expanding on this notion of the ‘still point’, Eliot describes it as being
[n]either from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity . . . (lines 63–64)
And a few lines later as a white light still and moving,Erhebung without motion, concentrationWithout elimination, both a new worldAnd the old made explicit, understoodIn the completion of its partial ecstasy,The resolution of its partial horror. (lines 73–78)
The similarities with ‘Whiteness I Remember’ are manifold. Plath’s poem, too, describes a state of Erhebung (German for ‘elevation, or upliftment’) born of a form of concentration that does not eliminate an awareness of the world at large. It too brings about a new world by redefining the old – it is in this terrifying situation that the speaker achieves her ‘wisdom’, her new perspective on her life. It too contains both ecstasy (in the sense that the already-mentioned ‘wisdom’ allows the speaker to stand figuratively outside herself) and horror – what the speaker terms her ‘fear’ – at its conclusion. And
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it too stresses the reconciliation of such states (‘Almost thrown, not / Thrown’, ‘fear, wisdom, at one’), presenting a speaker who, caught in the paradox of simultaneously experiencing movement and stasis (‘[s]pinning to still’), an experience that is conveyed through the colour white (‘in his one whiteness’), apprehends timelessness within time.
Insofar as ‘Whiteness I Remember’ presents an escape from time, then, it anticipates ‘Ariel’, which will take this escape to its logical conclusion by dissolving the speaker’s selfhood as well. In both poems it is the interaction with a horse that allows for the particulars of a life to be transcended: the speaker in ‘Whiteness I Remember’ transcends her daily existence through the interaction with Sam, while the speaker in ‘Ariel’ transcends her mythic drama through the interaction with Ariel.
But in Hughes’s poem ‘Sam’, which deals with the same event described in ‘Whiteness I Remember’, transcendent escape becomes tragic inevitability. In this poem, as in the rest of Birthday Letters, the volume in which it was published, the outlook is retrospective, and the world presented one of fixed outcomes, sealed fates. As Erica Wagner explains, ‘it is . . . destiny that governs the movement and shape of Birthday Letters’(2000, 32). In the volume, she elaborates, ‘[t]he future has its own existence, quite separate from Hughes and Plath’, and ‘[t]his already-existing future allows Birthday Letters to share [here Wagner quotes Plath’s poem, ‘Edge’] the “illusion of a Greek necessity” that Plath created for her own work’(2000, 54).
That Plath’s personal mythology and the myth of Plath that Hughes presents in Birthday Letters share a certain fatedness is true. By examining Birthday Letters we see how marked Plath’s influence is in Hughes’s last work. (Only fitting, we might wish to say, since the volume deals so exclusively with Plath.) But whereas Plath’s fatedness, the foreclosed future of her myth with its focus on selfhood, can be resolved by ‘rebirth or transcendence of self’ (Kroll 2007, 3), Hughes’s fatedness, an absolute fixity, cannot. Birthday Letters comes with a set trajectory for its subject; there is only one ending available to her. And when Hughes then simultaneously recreates Plath’s runaway ride on the horse Sam and assesses her poetic reading of that event in his poem, the tragic, ineluctable end of the narrative that his volume traces is already there, waiting to happen. In fact, what we see in the case of ‘Sam’ is that it, like Plath’s so-called occasional poems, is solicited by the overarching narrative that contains it. The biographical basis of ‘Sam’, it turns out, renders it suitable for absorption into the myth Hughes develops.
And the myth of Plath presented here, we soon see in the cryptic first lines of the poem, is something that takes account of Plath’s mythology. ‘It was all of a piece to you’, the poem’s speaker announces, ‘[t]hat your horse, the white calm stallion, Sam, / Decided he’d had enough / And started home at a gallop’ (lines 1–4). Such an opening raises questions. How precisely is it ‘of a piece’ to the Plath we find here that her deceptively calm horse should bolt and threaten her life? And what is it ‘of a piece’ with? When we consider certain features of Plath’s writing, however, answers emerge. There is the divided selfhood of her mythology, which requires that her false selves die
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‘That Gallop Was Practice’ 17
ritualistic deaths at the hands of the true selves. Or there is that line from Plath’s letter to her mother about the ‘terrible beauty of death’. Or the line in ‘Lady Lazarus’, where Plath’s speaker famously declares that ‘[d]ying / Is an art, like everything else’ (lines 43–44), and that she does it so ‘exceptionally well’ (line 45) that one could even say she ‘has a call’ (line 48), in other words, a calling.
Hughes’s speaker is, in other words, echoing Plath’s reading – her poetic interpretation – of the horse ride. It is the reading implicit in ‘Whiteness I Remember’, where the encounter with the animal is another encounter with the terrible beauty of death. ‘It was all of a piece to you’, the speaker claims, as if to say, ‘of course you were going to read it that way’. In ‘Whiteness I Remember’, as we have seen, the near-death experience is one that allows for a rebirth, a transcendence from the particulars of the speaker’s life, but in Hughes’s version, with its terrible and looming conclusion, this kind of transcendence is denied. Not surprisingly, then, his speaker counters his opening words immediately after having uttered them. ‘I can live / Your incredulity, your certainty / That this was it’ (lines 4–5). We must remember that Hughes is imagining his way into an experience he has no direct access to; these words signal his take on the event. Plath, in this conception, does not find in the encounter an experience that harmonizes with her poetic preoccupations; rather, she is faced with imminent and terrifying death. It is as though we have slid from one Plath, the Plath who is able to reconstruct her runaway ride with Sam in a poem that speaks of characteristic transcendence, to another, Plath as she appears in Birthday Letters, doomed from the start.
This Plath, with no access to transcendence, can only try her best to survive the ordeal with the horse. Hughes’s poem goes on to depict that survival with a music rich in jagged, harsh rhythms, a densely alliterative and assonantal sequence of sounds that both evokes his Plath’s panic and the strains of ‘Whiteness I Remember’. ‘You slewed under his neck’, (line 10) the speaker says,
An upside-down jockey with nothingBetween you and the cataract of macadam,That horribly hard, swift river,But the propeller terrors of his front legsAnd the clangour of the iron shoes, so far beneath you. (lines 11–15)
Yet even in this vivid description redolent of Plath’s poem we find a phrase that undoes Plath’s vision. Depicting the awful rush of road below the dangling Plath, the speaker calls it a ‘cataract of macadam’. The word ‘cataract’ is obviously meant to denote ‘a sudden rush of water’, ‘a downpour’ or ‘waterfall’ (oxforddictionaries.com). This is confirmed by the next line, which calls the road a ‘horribly hard, swift river’. But we cannot overlook the other meaning of ‘cataract’, ‘a medical condition in which the lens of the eye becomes progressively opaque, resulting in blurred vision’. In this sense Plath observes the ‘hard, swift river’ of road as though through eyes afflicted with cataracts. (‘You saw only blur’ [line 22] the speaker will say, a few lines later.) And the result is
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that Plath, far from having the eye-opening experience of the speaker of ‘Whiteness I Remember’, has her sight taken away from her, making her even more of a subject to the will of the horse and, by extension, the forces of fate Hughes employs in the poem.
Part of these forces of fate, we see as the poem progresses, is the force of poetry. The poetic destiny of Hughes and Plath is a central concern in Birthday Letters, an essential element in the delineation of their time together and a partial explanation of the calamity that befalls them. In ‘Fishing Bridge’, for instance, which recalls the time Hughes and Plath spent at Rock Lake in Canada (while they were travelling in and around North America), the voice of poetry manifests as an active entity urging them on ‘to find [their] souls’ (line 35), ‘find [their] true selves’ (line 36). The discovery this journey leads to is not a joyful one. While it may grant Plath fully-achieved selfhood in her poetry, it also steers her straight to the immovable ending that lies in wait. By the end of the poem the speaker is standing over Plath’s ‘dead face’ (line 50), ‘dead lips’ (line 51).
In ‘Sam’, however, poetry becomes a source of temporary salvation. ‘What saved you? Maybe your poems / Saved themselves’ (lines 19–20) the speaker muses. Then, in line 27, he decides: ‘[s]omething in you not you did it for itself’. As Erica Wagner (2000, 56) explains, Plath’s ‘work . . . is perceived as the product of an almost separate self, having its own agency’. This, then, is the only form of transcendence permitted by the realm of Birthday Letters: Plath’s work, not Plath, transcends the otherwise inescapable fate.
That inescapable fate is enacted at the poem’s close (it is enacted many times throughout the many poems of Birthday Letters). Hughes goes beyond the frozen ending of ‘Whiteness I Remember’ by having the horse ‘[walk] [back] into his stable’ (line 29), with Plath still clinging on, ‘probably’, we are told, ‘nearly unconscious’ (line 28). Next we have an assessment: ‘[t]hat gallop / Was practice’, the speaker says, ‘and quite useless’ (lines 28–29). This gives way to the concluding stanza of the poem, in which the speaker, presumably having assumed the form of a horse himself, is ridden by Plath. The second horse ride ends disastrously:
When I jumped a fence you strangled meOne giddy moment, then fell off,Flung yourself off and under my feet to trip meAnd tripped me and lay dead. Over in a flash. (lines 31–34)
The poem’s ending is complex. There is, firstly, the ambiguous phrase ‘jumped a fence’. Several readings are possible. Perhaps Hughes’s speaker-as-horse attempts to escape the close association with Plath, but finds that she holds him back, strangles him for it, then kills herself because of his act, or is killed by it. Or alternatively the speaker-as-horse and his Plath are making a futile bid for escape, aiming to attain, together, the kind of transcendence the world of Birthday Letters makes impossible. Or the speaker is a show-jumping horse, going through the rigours of a test (the test of a relationship?) with his rider, Plath, who will fail the test with him.
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‘That Gallop Was Practice’ 19
Then there is, secondly, the notable confusion of what Wagner (2000, 56) calls ‘actor and acted upon’. Either the Plath of this poem falls off her speaker-as-horse, or flings herself off. Neither action is presented as likelier than the other one. We may wish to call this a wilful act of evasion, but it also indicates to us the difficulties involved in assigning blame when the interaction is as close and as integrated as this.
Thirdly, in calling Plath’s ride with Sam a practice run, and by having his speaker become a horse Plath rides, Hughes is pointing to and confirming the tentative motifs bubbling under the surface of ‘Whiteness I Remember’. He makes explicit the implicit connection Plath’s poem has with him, just as he acknowledges, earlier, that her poem is about transcendence. And the final, frozen moment of ‘Whiteness I Remember’ is here utterly negated by the last words, ‘[o]ver in a flash’, which imply that any attempt at transcendent escape, be it Plath’s or Plath and her speaker-as-horse’s, is over before it even began.
Finally, Hughes also reveals why the biographical occasion of this poem has been accorded a place in the narrative of Birthday Letters: because it can be requisitioned as a precursor to and metaphor for his, or at least his textual double’s, interaction with Plath. In the same way that ‘Whiteness I Remember’ anticipates ‘Ariel’, which took its predecessor’s concerns with transcendence to their logical conclusion, the interaction with Sam here anticipates the interaction with Hughes, which takes the near-death experience and replaces it with a ‘real’ death.
Margaret Uroff (1979), aside from investigating how Hughes influences Plath in her poetry, also examines how Plath influences Hughes in his. Because of Plath, she argues, Hughes begins a shift to a more identifiably personal point of view in his work. This shift finds its culmination in Birthday Letters, a book that was widely regarded as being brimful of intimate revelations. But it is easy to forget that the depictions of the poet and the poet’s life on display in the volume are, not only by their very nature, but also in their self-conscious construction, fictional creations. Hughes takes from Plath not a tendency toward confession, or revealing biography, but rather methods and tools for the artistic manipulation of biographical subject matter. And the effect in his work is dramatic, or, more accurately, and in his own words, a ‘drama with the dead’ (in Middlebrook 2003, 275). From his poems ‘Phaetons’ and ‘The Horses’, in which animals are powerful presences of a non-human and unyielding cosmos, we move through the lens of Plath’s ‘Whiteness I Remember’ and ‘Ariel’, poems in which horses are related to personally, are in fact psychologized, and where they become closely linked to the individual fates of the speakers. And what we end up with is ‘Sam’, a poem in which a horse is both a psychologized animal and an aspect of a cold and unyielding universe, a fate set in stone.
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Notes1 This is at least tangentially supported by the fact that horseback riding may lead to tearing
of the hymen (Kyrillou, Son and Chalermthai 2009, 64).
2 Again, the one exception here is ‘Man in Black’.
3 ‘Faun’ and ‘Maudlin’, from 1956, ‘Ouija’, from 1957, and ‘Moonrise’ and ‘The Death of Myth-Making’, from 1958, are just a few examples (Kroll 2007, 43).
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Dover Publications.Graves, R. [1948] 1961. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London:
Faber and Faber.Heaney, S. 1988. The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and
Other Critical Writings. London: Faber and Faber.Hughes, T. [2003] 2005. Collected Poems. ed. Paul Keegan. London: Faber and Faber.Keats, J. 2000. John Keats: Poems Selected by Andrew Motion. London: Faber and Faber.Kroll, J. [1976] 2007. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Stroud: Sutton. Kyrillou, E., R. Son and K. Chalermthai. 2009. ‘Hymenoplasty: Bioethical Issues’. Columbia
University Journal of Bioethics, 8:64-67.Middlebrook, D. 2004. Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage. London: Little, Brown.Plath, S. 1981. Collected Poems. ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber._____. 2000. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor
Books.Sagar, K. [1975] 1978. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Uroff, M. D. 1979. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Wagner, E. 2000. Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters.
London: Faber and Faber.
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